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from the bring-back-common-sense-adctl dept.
Google engineers have proposed changes to Chromium which would completely break content-blocking extensions, including various ad blockers, ostensibly for "security" reasons.
Per The Register:
In a note posted Tuesday to the Chromium bug tracker, Raymond Hill, the developer behind uBlock Origin and uMatrix, said the changes contemplated by the Manifest v3 proposal will ruin his ad and content blocking extensions, and take control of content away from users.
Content blockers may be used to block ads, but they have broader applications. They're predicated on the notion that users, rather than anyone else, should be able to control how their browser presents and interacts with remote resources.
Manifest v3 refers to the specification for browser extension manifest files, which enumerate the resources and capabilities available to browser extensions. Google's stated rationale for making the proposed changes is to improve security, privacy and performance, and supposedly to enhance user control.
"Users should have increased control over their extensions," the design document says. "A user should be able to determine what information is available to an extension, and be able to control that privilege."
But one way Google would like to achieve these goals involves replacing the webRequest API with a new one, declarativeNetRequest.
[...] Hill, who said he's waiting for a response from the Google software engineer overseeing this issue, said in an email to The Register: "I understand the point of a declarativeNetRequest API, and I am not against such API. However I don't understand why the blocking ability of the webRequest API – which has existed for over seven years – would be removed (as the design document proposes). I don't see what is to be gained from doing this."
Hill observes that several other capabilities will no longer be available under the new API, including blocking media elements larger than a specified size, disable JavaScript execution by injecting Content-Security-Policy directives, and removing the outgoing Cookie headers.
And he argues that if these changes get implemented, Chromium will no longer serve users.
The Register points out that this will not just affect Google Chrome and Chromium, but also Chromium based web browsers such as Brave Browser and Microsoft Edge.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Apparition on Wednesday January 23 2019, @03:23PM (2 children)
gHacks published an article [ghacks.net] this morning with news that Opera has also gotten into the "block the ad-blockers game," currently only with search engines.
It feels like it is nearing endgame for web browsers that rely on advertisers for money.
"Now that Microsoft has finally folded and Chromium rules the web, what are you going to do? Run Firefox? Pfft. Watch as we break YouTube [dailydot.com] on non-Chrome browsers. Then what are you going to do?"
(Score: 2) by eravnrekaree on Wednesday January 23 2019, @03:33PM (1 child)
Edge is a completely proprietary browser and would have also adopted these ad-blocker blockers as well, so had Microsoft had not cancelled Edge's engine, you would still have all of these problems, Edge was no antidote to this. You could not fork Edge either since it was closed source, so Edge was no solution whatsoever. The fact is, Chromiums open source, why not just fork?
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 23 2019, @06:50PM
The codebase is a huge nasty POS.